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Making Social Waves With Gigya’s Leadership in First-Ever Forrester Wave

By December 5, 2017 No Comments

An endorsement from industry analysts is a helpful tool for tech companies. Journalists and PR firms cite analyst research in their articles and contributed pieces. Analysts are especially important partners for companies interested in breaking new ground through activities, such as category creation.

Gigya’s Senior Vice President of Marketing Jason Rose understood the potential impact of a successful category-creation campaign and the industry validation that would accompany it. After years of courtship between Gigya and Forrester Research, Forrester issued its first-ever Forrester Wave report covering Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) — a new industry category — where it declared Gigya the leader against formidable competitors, such as Janrain, Ping Identity, SalesForce, and Microsoft.

Rose wanted to amplify the endorsement as loudly and widely as possible. He turned to BOCA Communications, Gigya’s agency of record for more than three years, to help develop and execute an integrated strategy incorporating paid and organic social media, and traditional communications and marketing. We implemented a 3-month lead generation campaign based upon offering potential website visitors the analyst report as a downloadable asset.

SEO Forms a Solid Foundation for Integrated Strategies

As strategically determined keywords are directly tied to SEO and demand generation, we determined the critical verbiage to include in collateral across all channels — organic social and web copy, paid social copy, and traditional PR activities like contributed articles and press briefings.

Our final list of keywords used words on the websites of organizations that had also featured the Forrester Wave report. We also used keywords we knew would attract marketers and those interested in improving their customer experience. Since this was the inaugural Forrester Wave CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management) report in a completely new category, we performed A/B testing with verbiage to determine which messages that generated the most traction.

Return on Social Investment Lasts Beyond Campaign Window

At BOCA, we are firm believers that an integrated strategy will bolster the return on investment of pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns to provide long-term value and visibility. These types of strategies will also help elevate the impact of traditional PR results like pieces of coverage and briefings with analysts.

In order to achieve the goals of:

  • Driving traffic and downloads to the Forrester Wave report;
  • Re-engaging and targeting existing prospects by leveraging the Forrester Wave report; and,
  • Positioning Gigya as the leader in this new category by amplifying the message of and proliferating the mention of the analyst report across all channels, we developed a digital marketing strategy built to target prospects through SEM, organic and retargeting. We used channels, such as AdWords Search, Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook to blanket the potential customer landscape with messaging tailored for specific audiences.

An Integrated Approach Yields High-Value Results

We complemented these activities with traditional PR-based tactics of covering Gigya’s owned and earned channels with language and information directly related to the report. We executed an integrated strategy to help ensure a higher return on PPC/SEM and to continue to drive and convert high-intent searchers in the long-term.


Our campaign ran from June 2017 through August, 2017. While the campaign was successful, we aren’t able to post the actual results publicly. We can say, however, that Gigya has enjoyed tremendous growth, and was recently acquired by SAP. The company’s continued innovation, and recognition for it, is due to the hard work Gigya has put into developing its product, team-building and marketing efforts, with BOCA alongside as a dedicated PR partner.

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